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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 3. Space Brains

Quantum Theology

Resolving the proton crisis through oneiric intent—the universe heals itself through subjective experience.

Whew.

Building on the work of neurologists and dream researchers, physicist Fred Alan Wolf proposes that the dream state and quantum mechanics have a certain special relationship. He proposes that the identity, or self, of human psychology evolves out of the indeterminate, ambiguous, experiences of the dream state, that preconscious mental processing involves neural structures that compare quantum states in the brain and construct a particular self awareness from among the superposed possibilities. The process parallels that by which empirical events condense out of quantum superpositions in the world at large. Much like the identity you mold of yourself after taking college courses and online classes.  You begin as a freshman student with a vague idea of what you want to accomplish and end up registered for a class that you thought you would never be interested in.  But you learn something about yourself in that class that affects your main goal and you end up switching online degree programs to match your new identity.

Quantum collapse into objective events and the collapse of indeterminate dream (preconscious) states into subjective events are concomitant processes. Both are reductions of multiple possibilities into a particularized experience of selfhood. Gravitational self-collapse of the quantum superposition occurs when the quantum of subjectivity attains a magnitude that causes it to perceive itself, or that corresponds to it perceiving itself. This is the subjective correlate of the collapse of the quantum indeterminacy into a determinate event. The process that locates mass also locates consciousness (subjectivity). The two occurrences are simultaneous.

Wolf's model, described in The Dreaming Universe, recalls the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who proposed that the actual entities that compose this universe have simultaneously an objective and a subjective nature. He specifically used the language of subjectivity to describe the process by which actual events issue from indeterminacy. In Whitehead’s philosophy an actual event occurs through the concrescence of "prehensions" into a "satisfaction" of feeling. He called his philosophy the "philosophy of organism" to capture the simultaneity of objectivity and subjectivity in the process of the concrescence of events. Unfortunately, Whitehead's followers adopted the term "process philosophy" instead of "philosophy of organism" and thereby marginalized an intended implication of Whitehead's thought.

The star larvae hypothesis adds a layer of conjecture to this already speculative construction. It proposes that the dream state, specifically the lucid dream state, and more specifically the amplified communal lucid dream state, has a particular efficacy in terms of the observer effect of quantum mechanics, in which human intent can affect the outcome of quantum processes. In other words, the lucid dream is that brand of consciousness most adept at influencing quantum events through intent and is therefore the state of mind best suited to conjuring protons from the quantum fluctuations that permeate spacetime and that produce Hawking radiation.

Wolf goes so far as to suggest that just as the specific events of the physical world precipitate out of the range of possibilities presented in quantum indeterminacy and participate collectively in a physical universe at large, so too do the many psychological selves that precipitate out of the range of possibilities presented in the dream state participate collectively in a mental or experiential metaphysical universe at large, a notion essentially theological. It suggests the generalized notion from many traditions of a transcendent Cosmic Mind, or God.

The Big Bang and the Big Wow

A kind of quantum theology has grown also from the work of Penrose and Hameroff. Leveraging their model of cosmic consciousness, astrophysicist Paola Zizzi proposes that in the earliest moments of the Big Bang the mass of the entire universe-to-be was for a brief moment superposed in a quantum coherent state. This state of superposition corresponds to what is called the inflationary phase of the early universe, a phase of very rapid expansion which has become a standard feature of the Big Bang cosmology. Zizzi proposes that this primordial indeterminacy collapsed in an objective reduction that would have been accompanied by an instance of subjectivity, or what Stuart Hameroff calls "the Big Wow." The theological implications of this idea are stark and staggering. Zizzi explains her phenomenological interpretation of the Big Bang at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0007006.

Whitehead's philosophy includes a theology that complements all of these ideas. In it God has three natures: a primordial nature in which God plays the role of thaumaturge and which seems to correspond to Zizzi's phenomenological interpretation of inflationary cosmology. God's second nature, his consequent nature, is in process of becoming and corresponds to the actual evolution of the physical universe, including the subjective experiences of the creatures. Once these experiences occur, they are knowable and become data in God's memory. God's third nature is superjective and is the lure that God dangles before the universe to persuade it to elaborate increasingly novel and aesthetically intense occurrences. The "nudge" takes the form of a subjective feeling.

The Retrieval of Metanarrative

Grand historiographic systems, such as Whitehead's, constitute what in academic theory gets called "metanarrative." The term refers to an overarching organizing concept that bestows a plot to the events of history. Examples include

• Marxism, in which history is a competition among social classes
• Analytic psychology (Freud), in which history is competition between civilization and its discontents (the repressed drives of the Id)
• Darwinism, in which (natural) history is a competition among species and/or individuals and/or genes for material resources
• The Enlightenment, in which history is a competition between scientific rationalism and religious superstition
• Christianity, in which history is a competition between God and Satan
• . . . and so on.

Deconstructive and postmodern academic theorists tend to dismiss metanarratives in favor of more anarchic/ironic interpretations of historical events.

The star larvae hypothesis is a blatant metanarrative in which history is a competition between novelty and habit, but which subordinates all events to the ontogenetic life cycle of the universe. The grand narrative plot is, admittedly, religious. It includes such hallmarks of religion as an unfolding of events that serves cosmic purposes, ascent to the heavens, and the transcendence of the flesh. However, unlike religious narratives, this plot requires the participation of science. It enlists science to articulate principles that describe the behaviors of matter and energy in ways that engineers can use. The deepest yearnings of the religious sensibility indeed show the way. But only the ingenuity and applied methods of science can satisfy those yearnings. Even the most purebred Rortian pragmatist, who would not bother with the theory behind the star larvae hypothesis, should be able to line up behind the hypothesis on purely pragmatic grounds, because it describes a utopian—a super-utopian—future built on the momentum of Western civilization.

NEXT > Cyberfetus Rising

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